Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Book Review for
Jewish Book Month Shabbat
November 23, 2001
Living a Life that Matters:
Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success
By Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
In 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner burst on the publishing scene. His best-selling "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" has now been translated into literally scores of languages and has provided help and guidance to people on every continent. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 20th anniversary reissue has been flying out of bookstores coast to coast. I reviewed that book for you and then each of his subsequent best-selling and very helpful books — When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough; Who Needs God?; To Life!; and How Good Do We Have To Be?
Truth be told, I have been a Harold Kushner fan longer than most people. Years before "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," I already had read and admired his lesser-known volumes which had been oriented more toward his fellow rabbis than to the general market — Commanded to Live and When Children Ask About God. So, I can honestly report that I have read all seven of Kushner’s books, and many of his articles and sermons. If today I am a Kushnerian in my thinking and teaching, it is because he has managed to address my own theological concerns in a way that I feel has enabled me to be more helpful with my congregants in their times of need.
I find Kushner’s clarity of thought and outstanding ability to teach Judaism inspiring. I also am fond of Harold Kushner, the man. Three years ago this fall, Rabbi Kushner was scheduled to speak on a Tuesday at a major gathering sponsored by one of the hospital foundations here in Tulsa. I called the Chaplain and learned that Kushner was due to arrive late Monday afternoon. I wrote to Rabbi Kushner, with whom I have corresponded off and on for years, and told him about our Institute of Adult Jewish Studies and what a great treat it would be if he would be willing to spend some time with our most dedicated students. We would not advertise this to the public, but rather make it a special privilege for the institutors. Would he be willing?
Now you should know that Rabbi Kushner gets $10,000 to $15,000 for a lecture today and is sought out to speak all over the globe. This was chutzpah; I was asking for a freebie. I did not have to wait for a written response. He called me and said: "Charles, I’ll be happy to do that. Tell me where and what time." I was impressed and grateful. Some of you may remember that we sat in this sanctuary between shortened first and second-hour classes for 45 minutes as one of the great teachers of our time gave us a stimulating lesson on prayer.
The more I read Kushner and come to know him, the more I find that we share common likes and dislikes. Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, formerly of Temple Israel in Boston, was one of Kushner’s and my heroes; his influence on both of our thinking was considerable. Then I learned in reading this book that we share a very favorite western — "Shane." I could probably watch that movie every week. I was moved by Kushner’s interpretation of a part of that movie in this volume. Finally, I would like to think that I have had a little influence on Harold Kushner, as I have both chided and nudged him for the sexist God language in previous volumes. In this, his newest book, he is much more sensitive to this matter.
"Living a Life that Matters" contains both vintage Kushner and new ideas. I find that one Kushner volume reinforces others, because his is a consistent view of life.
How do we live our life so that it matters? This is what Rabbi Kushner considers the central challenge of living. "Most people are not afraid of dying; they are afraid of not having lived . . . People can accept the inescapable fact of mortality. What frightens them more is the dread of insignificance, the notion that we’ll be born and live and one day die and none of it will matter. People don’t really want to live forever. Living forever would be like reading a good book, or watching a good movie, that never ended. People understand that the story of their lives has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what they desperately want is to live long enough to get it right, to feel that they have done something worthwhile with their lives, however long." (Pp. 146-7)
One of the things which most attracts me to Rabbi Kushner is that his illustrations come from the Bible, as well as from today. In this volume, Jacob is the paradigm and, by studying the life of our third patriarch, Rabbi Kushner discovers how to live a life that matters. In each of his books, we learn more about biblical figures than we ever knew before. We are reminded of biblical stories, most of which are familiar to us, but we explore them in greater depth than ever before. Yet, Kushner’s marvelous illustrations, which make his writings so clear, also come from the modern world of TV, literature, entertainment, business and counseling.
Kushner’s premise is that we want to matter, to make a difference, and we also want to be good. That is the central dilemma of many of our lives. To think of ourselves as good people while, from time to time, we find ourselves doing things that make us doubt our goodness. "We dream of leaving the world a better place for having passed through it, though we often wonder whether, in our quest for significance, we litter the world with our mistakes more than we bless it with our accomplishments." Therefore, "our souls are split, part of us reaching for goodness, part of us chasing fame and fortune and doing questionable things along the way." (P. 15) Kushner holds that the story of Jacob can teach us how to close that gap between the longings of our soul for significance and the scoldings of our conscience as we seek goodness.
We know more about Jacob than virtually any other biblical character. More chapters of Genesis are devoted to Jacob and his family than to any of the other patriarchs. He is the only person in the Bible whom we see in action as a child, as a young man, a mature husband and father, and an old man contemplating death. We see Jacob interacting with his own parents, his wives, his father-in-law, his children and his grandchildren, as well as with the God of his ancestors.
For Kushner, the ladder that Jacob dreams of is the important symbol of Jacob’s life. It teaches us that Jacob is a person who grows. The ladder that bridges Heaven and earth in his dream represents the distance between Jacob as he is and Jacob as he would like to be. Jacob’s life story is the account of his struggle to climb that ladder, to ascend from a lower level of behavior to a higher one, and thus become a more complete person.
If the ladder dream is one important experience in his life, that which represents the boundary between youth and adulthood, then the wrestling match is the other major experience of his life. Kushner views the adversary — the angel — as Jacob’s conscience, that part of him which summons him to rise above his bad impulses. Jacob is at war with himself. "Only when marriage and fatherhood and the experience of being cheated by others had gained Jacob a measure of maturity was he strong enough to let his conscience hold its own against him. (P. 29) And so, on that last night before re-entering Canaan, Jacob prays again. But this time there is no bargaining with God. "This time Jacob says to God, You have already done more for me than I had any right to expect. I have nothing to offer You in return. All I can say is this: I am turning to You because I need you." (P. 30) He does not ask God to solve his problems for him. He prays for strength to do the right thing, and this is Kushner’s point — "doing the right thing is the best medicine for a troubled soul."
On that dark night by the bank of the river, Jacob’s desire to be successful, to get what he wanted in life by whatever means it took, came into conflict with his growing need to think of himself as a good person. For the first time in his life, Jacob’s conscience was strong enough to stand up to him and, to his astonishment, Jacob found that he liked himself better when his conscience prevailed against him.
Kushner adds: "It hurts to be defeated by conscience, to feel compelled to take the more demanding high road, to resist temptation, to apologize. But I suspect it hurts more to keep winning over conscience. Too often we compromise our integrity, we do something we really don’t believe in doing, to reach some important goal, only to find two frustrating things happening: Either we gain the prize and realize it wasn’t worth gaining, or we end up with neither the prize nor our integrity . .
When we defeat the still, small voice of God inside us, we lose. But that voice inside us will not be stilled forever (and God help the person who does succeed in permanently stilling the voice of his conscience). It will find a time when we are vulnerable. It will attack us at a weak moment. And when the struggle is over, we will, like Jacob/Israel, be bruised and limping. But, again like Jacob, we will be whole, we will be at peace with ourselves, in a way we never were before." (Pp. 33-4)
In the Chapter 3, Rabbi Kushner raises the question: why do good people do bad things? Basically, he is trying to determine whether we are born good or bad, strong or weak. "Are we naturally good and pure until external circumstances compromise our goodness? Or are we actually weak and deceitful, needing conscience or outside authority to keep us in line?" Kushner’s answer is that we are both. In keeping with Jewish tradition, he sees "every human being as having good and bad tendencies, impulses to charity and impulses to selfishness, the desire to be truthful and the desire to lie. These tendencies are in constant tension within us, even as the Bible describes Jacob and Esau struggling in Rebecca’s womb . . . even as Jacob had to struggle with part of himself to become the person he wanted to be. That would explain why good people can be corrupted by the prospect of financial gain or led astray by anger, and why criminals can display affection and loyalty." (P. 49)
Kushner puts it together this way: "I believe you cannot be a complete person without having to wrestle with your own demons — and, for that matter, with your own angel. Like the man or woman who lifts weights at the gym to become stronger, a process known as "resistance training", we strengthen our moral fiber by the exercise of resisting temptation. Sometimes the angel of conscience wins out over temptation, sometimes temptation gets the better of the angel . . . Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human. In the daily, if not hourly, wrestling matches that set the tone of our lives, sometimes the angel wins and sometimes the angel loses. With luck, we will not be overwhelmed by guilt when the egotistical impulse defeats the angel, and we will understand that the victory is temporary, not permanent, when the angel wins. We will understand that, to be human, we need them both. But we will never stop asking ourselves, What kind of person do I want to be?" (Pp. 54-6, 59)
Chapter four, the longest chapter in the book, deals with resisting the pleasure of getting even. Revenge is one of the strongest emotions we feel. Kushner analyzes the problem as mainly feeling powerlessness and helplessness, and that what we need is to restore or reclaim power over our own lives. It is a chapter about the purpose of punishment and imprisonment, reconciliation and rehabilitation, and it is not an easy read.
The chapter entitled "Shalom, The Quest for Integrity" is more of vintage Kushner. He uses a very vivid example of the 1995 fire in the Malden Mills Factory Complex and how the Jewish owner, Aaron Fuerstein, continued to see that his employees received their paychecks even though there was no work and determines to rebuild the plant on its site. It is a story that made all the national media, a story about integrity, which means being whole, unbroken, undivided so that there is no longer a split in the soul. And this chapter is about how the word of God, the authentic voice of God, becomes our will.
I found it is a very persuasive chapter about how people learn to resist evil and choose good. Let me give you an example. Fuerstein is not a saint; he is a mensch, a good person. He battles insurance companies, government officials, competitors out to steal his customers, his own mangers and even himself. Kushner says, "a saint would never be tempted to take the easy way, the more profitable way, enriching himself at the expense of others. A mensch would be sorely tempted but would resist the temptation. He would struggle with temptation but would prevail. He would let the angel win . . . He would recognize the dominating voice inside his head as his own true voice, speaking God’s words, and he would have no choice but to obey." (p. 101)
Chapter 6 reminds us of the importance of family and friends. "We are who we love," Kushner says. "We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be." (p. 120) In this chapter Kushner teaches us what friendship is all about and offers a very fine analysis of why men do not have friends as women do. Love and friendship, he says, brings God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.
I was astonished to read chapter seven because for several years now I’ve been contemplating writing a book; some of you have urged me to do it. My book was/is going to be titled "The Supporting Cast." I have preached over the years about some of the minor characters in the Bible from whom I believe we can learn so much, and without whom the heroes and heroines would not have succeeded. Along comes my mentor, and he says exactly the same thing, only often better than I have been saying it. He says the Bible rarely wastes words; there are minor characters in the biblical narrative but no superfluous characters. He points out how often we mean more to people than we can ever understand. He says, "I believe that ordinary people joining forces can do things that heroes acting alone cannot do." One of the ways in which our soul’s craving for significance is met is that "whoever we are and however much or little we accomplish in our lives, we matter to God. Our relationship to God is not that of slaves to a master who demands obedience, but of students to a master Teacher who would tell us how to live." "We do not have to find the cure for cancer to make a difference to the world. We do not have to write great novels to be noticed by God. We only have to share our lives with other people . . . We are the supporting cast of a great and on-going drama, and it is our . . . privilege to be part of it." (pp. 138, 143, 145)
According to Rabbi Kushner, what we learn from our patriarch Jacob is that each of us counts, matters and that goodness and love are two of the experiences that assure us that our lives have mattered in the world. By loving others — friends, family — and by doing good, we succeed. "Jacob could contemplate with profound satisfaction at the end of his life how he overcame early mistakes and moral compromises to become a good man, and how being a good man made a difference. He could not have foreseen that his descendants would give the world the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the prophets and the Psalms. But he had every reason to believe that each person who chooses to be generous rather than selfish, to be truthful rather than deceptive, represents a vote for a world of generosity and truth rather than selfishness and deception. If enough people vote that way, we will end up with a more generous, more truthful community, and we will all benefit. . . Everyone who puts in an honest day’s work, everyone who goes out of his or her way to help a neighbor, everyone who makes a child laugh, changes the world for the better." (pp. 149-50)
Harold Kushner is an incisive thinker, an inspiring writer and an insightful spiritual leader. This is a primer of the truly important things in life. Frankly, it — as well as his previous books — deserves to be re-read periodically because they remind us about what is really important in our lives. They help us struggle with the gap between who we are and who we know we ought to be. With guidance, encouragement and support like this, may we all continue growing. Amen.
